This bickering serves only to kill innovation rather than protect advantages for inventors. The patents in question don’t protect brilliant ideas. They cover trivial and obvious ingredients in every piece of software. Yahoo!’s suit against Facebook claims that it invented the concept of “dynamic web pages,” meaning pages that change for you depending on your preferences or user account.

If every company with dynamic pages had to pay a royalty to Yahoo!, no startups would have succeeded since 2000.

Suggestions for patent reform exist. Some ideas are quite good. Alex Tabarrok proposes many of the best, including varying the lifespan of a patent in relation to the development cost. But as with many government institutions, change will come slowly. And the bureaucracy will always struggle to keep pace with the technology.

But now there’s an attempt by Twitter to jumpstart patent reform, on its own, without waiting for the patent office to change the rules.

Twitter has announced an “Innovators Patent Agreement,” or IPA, a sort of contractual rider that will be attached to the patents it receives.

Under the agreement, the holder of the patent promises it will not use the patent to attack other companies, but only to protect itself against patent suits.

In other words, Twitter won’t sue someone for making a Twitter rip-off, but if anyone else claims Twitter was their idea, Twitter can prove it wasn’t.

When the inventor of new software works for a large company, it’s usually the company that gets to file the patent and be the owner of that intellectual property. But the IPA enlists the actual inventor as the sort of custodian of the agreement.

The Yahoo! executives that promised Baio the patents would only be used for defense have long since left the company, and it was their replacements that violated the earlier promise.

The IPA would prevent this, too. A legal addendum attached to the patent would stipulate that the original inventor would have the right to prevent aggressive patent trolling, no matter who it’s transferred to.

It’s a great idea, but the IPA faces a number of challenges before it revitalizes the technology industry.

First, the biggest trouble with the current patent situation is that the patents in question cover basic technologies. Those patents already exist without the IPA. Even if every software company adopted the policy today, it would take decades before today’s innovations were considered basic enough to solve this problem.

That’s the other trouble: Every company isn’t going adopt the IPA today.

Even if patent giants like Google or Microsoft agree with the spirit of the new agreement, you can be sure their legal teams will raise a stink before letting them participate. There’s just too many unknowns.

Twitter has such a small patent footprint that a cynic might suggest the company released this agreement as a way to lure talented engineers away from other competitors.

There’s no doubt that an agreement like the one Twitter has proposed would free up software startups to innovate at a much faster pace, with much less concern for the legal red tape that can slow them down.

As consumers of technology, let’s hope that the coders can win out over the executives just this once.